Dawkins Deconstruction Part II

So I meant to do this not long after part I, but the main reason I didn’t was the great amount of negative feedback I received. Turns out, trying to be cute with my little “I don’t believe in Richard Dawkins” intro served only to wildly sidetrack most everyone and make me eligible for all sorts of ad hominem. In that regard, I regret trying to spice up the article with said snappy intro, whether or not it really proved to be that snappy. If you haven’t read part I, I encourage you to do so, but if you want to skip the whole first part of it, be my guest.

Preface

Today I’d like to deal specifically with “Chapter 3: Arguments for God’s Existence,” and primarily Dawkins’ addressing of the major traditional arguments for God put forth by the scholastics. Again, I’ll be citing from my Silver-and-orange paperback, the First Mariner Books edition, 2008, if you want to follow along. But first, I’d like to make one thing very clear:

I do not, for the record, take issue against Mr. Dawkins for atheism. Far from it. As I believe I have said at numerous points in the past, there are many atheists for whom I maintain a great deal of respect and admiration, notably Sarte, Russel, and (for some reason) Nietzsche. It is far, far from me to make a personal attack on someone for what they believe about Theology. That would amount to utter nonsense in my book.

“Fine,” some people say, “so you have no problem with atheists who are atheists but respect your religion and leave it alone; you have a problem with Dawkins because he wants to condemn/destroy/undermine/speak out against your religion. That’s why you don’t like him. You want a quiet atheist, a placid leave-me-alone atheist.” This is a response I’ve gotten a lot, but that’s not it either. Again, this goes back to my fundamental concern over proper discourse and rationalism. Talk. Everyone talk, read, write, debate, research, investigate, whatever you want to do. By all means let us dialogue about atheism and various religions and the merits of all things. My issue is with fallacy, rhetoric, and pseudo-intellectualism. Fred Phelps, for example, is someone in whom I have a hard time believing, because he is so completely insane. He’s a Christian (or so he says). I discount him, as well as Dawkins. The people who put out the Chick Tracts? Also babbling idiots. The common denominator here isn’t religious affiliation, it’s craziness.

Arguments for the Existence of God

Dawkins begins with Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways (or Five Proofs), and this would be standard enough, except for the fact that Dawkins (proudly) remains ignorant of theological details, which makes his assessment of Aquinas a little embarrassing. Dawkins takes the first three of Aquinas’ proofs (Unmoved Mover, Uncaused Cause, and the Cosmological Argument) in one stride, and notes that “all three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress” (p.101). This is what’s funny. Yeah, a theologian might say, yeah, he is. That’s the whole point of the matter. If there is a God, and he created everything, he operates out of the fabric of space time where there is no causation because there is no time; there is no need for causation or causal theories, least of all for the being who brought time (and, thereby, causation itself) into existence. This is really a very simple reply to a very simple mistake on his part. But, like we established last time, Dawkins is no philosopher, much less a meta-physician.

Dawkins continues to miss the point of the God Hypothesis when he later continues with, “To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big band singularity,’ or some other physical concept as yet unknown” (p.101-102). Some other physical concept. Again, he’s missing the point of the whole problem of the origin of space-time and matter! An infinite regression of matter is a problem, a huge logistical problem for the same reasons: you can’t have a thing causing a thing causing a thing that goes back infinitely. That’s what he says about God; “who/what created God, then?” People who make this sort of argument fundamentally don’t understand what is meant by “God”; they are still stuck in the matter-and-energy paradigm, instead of shifting to the spiritual paradigm: There is time, so there is causality, and things have causes. This is what happens in space-time. Therefore it is necessary to invoke something that is outside of space-time, something meta-physical, literally super-natural (above/beyond/outside of the naturalistic plane of matter), or however you want to phrase it, in order to give a proper origin for matter. Why? Because the metaphysical is not limited by space-time, and without time as a limitation, causation is not an issue.

Does that mean we just proved God? Hardly. But neither has Dawkins even addressed the issue. To do that, he would need to move into metaphysics, but since he has no background in it, he can hardly hope to accomplish that.

Dawkins likewise blunders all over himself as he attempts a reductio ad absurdum argument on Aquinas’ Argument from Degree. He notes that “You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God” (p.102). Here Dawkins is substituting “smelliness” or “any dimension of comparison you like,” for Aquinas’ arguments about Goodness and Perfection.

Here is where he very, very clearly does not have a philosophy degree. He is confusing metaphysical qualitative things like Perfection and Goodness with a physical descriptor of sensory perception (smelliness). This is what we call a Category Error in the philosophy world, which is another fallacy. Any amount of Plato would have taught him the distinction.

Moving finally to tackle the Ontological Argument, Dawkins strikes the reader as a child approaching the arena of men. Why might that be? The same reason: he doesn’t have a philosophy degree. His arguments against the Ontological Argument consist basically of his gut-level reactions to it (“The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically” p.105), followed up by invoking Kant to solve the problem for him. The text lacks any discussion of why existence as a property is problematic, or if that is even the move Anselm is making. Since Plantinga, that latter presumption has been open to serious reconsideration, and Kant’s “devastating” critique has fallen by the wayside as largely off-topic. And, like so many other occasions, the Ontological Argument lives on. Dawkins as a whole says very little about the Ontological Argument itself, and it is little wonder: the argument is so long-lived, so virile and dexterous as to have shrugged off countless philosophers and critics, we cannot realistically expect Dawkins to even come close to unpacking it. And we are not surprised: he leaves the whole issue packed up neatly, never even dipping his feet into the great depth of the problems involved, content to insult the argument from afar. This is probably the weakest point in the ENTIRE text. When he moves on, I cannot imagine what kind of person with any amount of philosophical training could be anywhere near satisfied with his analysis.

In short, in addressing the major arguments for the existence of God, Dawkins doesn’t even come close to unpacking the arguments. Does that mean, then, that because Dawkins fails God exists? Not necessarily. But if a text is going to accomplish the goals Dawkins set out to do, it’s going to need to be massively more thorough than this.

That’s all I have for today. If you want an excellent review of the God Delusion by one of the great philosophers of our age, read Plantinga‘s review!